The Tristan Betrayal

Rating:
Summary: Very poor writing and storyline....
Review: A very disappointing book from this great writer... Story doesn't make much sense and is unimaginative, writing is pretty bad and the book is filled with "cliché" and "déja-vu" moment.
Ludlum missed the opportunîty to deliver one of his great spy stories in the interesting WWII environment...

Rating:
Summary: Solid but not spectacular
Review: As the years pass since the death of Robert Ludlum, it becomes less and less clear exactly how much Ludlum there actually is in the novels going out solely under his name. Tristan Betrayal clearly has the underpinnings of a Ludlum spy novel. At the same time, however, it does not contain the deep intricacies that were the hallmark of his earliest work. That said, this was still an enjoyable read. This book grabs the reader early as US Ambassador Stephen Metcalfe arrives in Moscow during the volatility of Russia in the early 1990s. The reader is then quickly taken back in time to occupied France in WWII. As the story unfolds, a young Metcalf is stationed in France as an intelligence agent. As the plot progresses, Metcalf must overcome physical and emotional challenges. Every so often the reader is transported back to the setting at the beginning of the book - Moscow in the early 1990s. While Ludlum aficionados may yearn for the old days, the Tristan Betrayal still is worth a quick read. It is solid, but not spectacular.

Rating:
Summary: Solid but not spectacular
Review: As the years pass since the death of Robert Ludlum, it becomes less and less clear exactly how much Ludlum there actually is in the novels going out solely under his name. Tristan Betrayal clearly has the underpinnings of a Ludlum spy novel. At the same time, however, it does not contain the deep intricacies that were the hallmark of his earliest work. That said, this was still an enjoyable read. This book grabs the reader early as US Ambassador Stephen Metcalfe arrives in Moscow during the volatility of Russia in the early 1990s. The reader is then quickly taken back in time to occupied France in WWII. As the story unfolds, a young Metcalf is stationed in France as an intelligence agent. As the plot progresses, Metcalf must overcome physical and emotional challenges. Every so often the reader is transported back to the setting at the beginning of the book - Moscow in the early 1990s. While Ludlum aficionados may yearn for the old days, the Tristan Betrayal still is worth a quick read. It is solid, but not spectacular.

Rating:
Summary: cliched, cliched, and cliched
Review: fair warnig to the publisher: please stop cash-in ludlum so shamelessly. after the great writer died, all the books published under his name with or without co-authors suck big time. there's almost none of them decent enough worth reading. this is almost like a factory without quality control, book after book printed out by a single formatted software, automatically mix, reverse and change the names, places, plots....whatever you can think about and then a new book title and jacket design. did you guys outthere ever hear the 'same s..t, different day?' this could be used to ludlum's phoney books too: 'same s..t, different title.'
give it a rest, will you?

Rating:
Summary: Of course it's not the same. He's dead.
Review: Few people could write the espionage thriller as Robert Ludlum could. Bits of him are found in Nelson DeMille, Len Deighton, LeCarre to some extent, and Furst to some extent. And the Nazis and Russians are an enormous mother lode of people who transcend evil. So it's hard to run out of bad guys.

Another thing that punctuates the Ludlum novel in addition to great characters is that there is that stream of history that runs through it. Accuracy. Some truth. How much? We just don't know. Jason Bourne? We don't dismiss him because we can see where such events might have commenced. The Parsifal Mosaic? Might have been. Who knows.

And here we have Stalingrad. Giving the devil his due, literally and figuratively, how could Hitler have been coerced into invading Russia? Yammamoto was supposed to have called the U.S. 'the sleeping giant' after the rejection of a second attack on Pearl, but any student of history knows that the real sleeping giant was the rabid Bear of Mother Russia.

So a diabolical, intricate plan is hatched to use double and triple agents to create that whiff of believability, and somehow translate that pseudo conspiracy to the highest level of the Third Reich, to Hitler himself. To not just shatter the truce between Germany and Russia, but to get Hitler to invade the Soviet Union.

And at the center of this, a man we start off disliking, the promiscuous, educated, multi-lingual Steven Metcalf.

Good plot, complicated figures, double crosses and triple crosses. Murder most foul. But we must remember that it is a rewrite. Mr. Ludlum is dead. This is but a manuscript, a work in progress.

My criticism of the novel is that too much time is spent explaining to the reader why Metcalf is NOT going to do something, virtually over and over. The dialogue is crisp but the introspective thought patterns tedious. They are too long. It drags in parts.

Excellent stuff but maybe it's time to let Mr. Ludlum rest in peace. 4 stars. Larry Scantlebury

Rating:
Summary: An Action-Packed Story, But It Does Not Sound Like Ludlum
Review: I always liked Robert Ludlum's stories, despite one-sentence paragraphs, stilted dialog, and contrived excitement. He gave us a grand picture of an earth-shaking event. In the case of The Tristan Betrayal, we meet Stephen Metcalfe, American secret agent, using the cover of an Argentine playboy to gather intelligence in German-occupied Paris during World War Two. But his cover is blown and his cell members killed. He has to get out of Paris, so he is sent to Moscow to try to use the love of his life, a Russian ballerina, to feed false information to the Germans to influence them to attack the Soviet Union and bring it into the war on the side of the allies. Again, his cover is blown, and he escapes to Berlin. Unfortunately, the story has a continuous set of death-threatening situations that face Metcalfe with monotonous regularity, and a set of improbable escapes each time. It reminds me of a James Bond novel, but Metcalfe is not as clever as Bond. Having said all this, I recommend the book if you are going on a long flight, or other boring activity, because the action never stops, and it will keep your attention.

Rating:
Summary: What was that?
Review: I have read almost all of Mr. Ludlum's works and this one didn't feel like any of them. A rewiever below was comparing The Tristan Betrayal with The Sigma Protocol? Duh!! This book is not a Sigma and it's not a Prometheus, either. It lacks the Ludlum's trademark of fast paced action combined with high level of suspense and of course mystery. "My novels are complicated because real life is [sic]" said Robert Ludlum once. I haven't seen any of the complexity that we were so used to from his previous novels.

Rating:
Summary: This military intelligence agent knows better
Review: I have read every book published by Robert Ludlum, and I must say that this is quite a step down from even the weakest of his novels. I can only assume that the publishers got hold of a first draft and edited it for publication because that is exactly how it reads. I would like to think that Ludlum would never have submited this for publication as is. Perhaps a few re-writes later and this would have been a good novel. As it is, I find it rather obvious and not all that well written.

Rating:
Summary: Lost steam, unbelievable
Review: I just finished this book a few days ago. What a disappointment. I thought that since it had the great name Ludlum on it, it would be better. How wrong I was.

I agree with the reviewer who said it lost steam after about 150 pages. It started out great, and I was really enjoying it as the tension built up. But then something happened midway through where it just became unbelievable. The main character, Metcalfe (who is supposed to be only 29 but acts way older at times) will be in a hot spot, unable to get out, and lo-and-behold, somebody would come along just in time to rescue him, or he'd happen upon just the right tool to help him out of the job. In the end, everything fell together just too easily, and it was too cliche the way the "bad guy" spent several pages explaining what he did, the whole time threatening to kill the hero. I just can't recommend this book.

Rating:
Summary: Readable and surprisingly plausible
Review: I just happen to enjoy Lundlum potboilers and this one doesn't disappoint.

I don't know how much of this is Ludlums and how much was ghosted but it is close enough to Lundlums style where it doesn't really matter.

I try not to quibble too much about fantastic escapes and such, as long as the story flows well. This one moves fast and the action hardly lets up for a page.

I did enjoy the premise - that the U.S. manipulated Hitler into attacking the Soviet Union by planting fake documents. This is plausible and one possible explantion for Hitlers actions that have so far defied reasonable explanation by most historians. Hitler may have been insane but he wasn't crazy.

It had a lot of material about FDR's and Harry Hopkins communist sympathies and is consistent with historical fact as far as the strife and struggles preceeding the U.S's entry into WWII.

I suppose few readers are that well versed on pre-WWII history to know this, but there were a lot of Nazi sympathizers in the US prior to the war. Many viewed Hitler and not Stalin as the "lesser of two evils", and felt the US should have allied with Germany against the USSR. This book recaps that history in the context of the story without taking any stand on the matter.

Like most of Ludlums stories, he is good with detail and keeps the story moving well enough where you'll want to finish it in as few a sittings as possible.

This is not high literature, it is not ground-breaking it's just good old fashioned action and adventure with enough plot twists to keep you going even though many of the outcomes are predictable. The predictability doesn't seriously detract from the enjoyment of the novel.

I have to say that this is on par with Lundlums best works and worth a read.